Scribes in the Time of Steroids

Last week, three dead men were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. At a rain-delayed ceremony at Cooperstown’s Doubleday Field, a small crowd of diehards witnessed Deacon White (catcher), Jacob Ruppert (club owner who built Yankee Stadium), and Hank O’Day (umpire) get canonized in lieu of our generation’s heroes, the grandees of baseball’s so-called “steroid era.”

Since a player must be retired for five years to be eligible for the Hall, this year marked the first crucible for many of the tainted stars of the nineteen-nineties and aughts. Earlier this winter, many of the Hall’s electors used this chance, and their non-votes, to protest the game’s alleged cheaters. Under normal circumstances, the first ballot appearances of Roger Clemens, one of the best right-handed pitchers on record, and Barry Bonds, baseball’s all-time home-run leader, would have been the occasion for a major fête. Instead, Cooperstown saw a fraction of the usual attendance, only the most zealous pilgrims, dressed piously in the jerseys and caps of their hometown teams. In the empty hall, you could hear echoing footsteps; a museum security guard could be seen leaning against a wall in the “Hank Aaron, Chasing the Dream” exhibit, taking a little nap.

Around the village of Cooperstown, people were whispering about Alex Rodriguez, the greatest hitter still active in the game. Just that morning, the league had threatened him with a rare lifetime ban for his repeated use of banned substances. (Ultimately, Major League Baseball suspended A-Rod for two hundred and eleven games, a decision he is appealing.)

To compensate for this year’s melancholic referendum on the steroid era, the Hall dug deep into history for solace. There was something glaring in its decision to turn back the clock as far as possible, to a time long before any aging star stuck a needle in his ass, back to the safety of a remote period when a catcher like the 2013 inductee Deacon White (b. 1847), who played for such teams as the Cleveland Forest Citys and the Boston Red Stockings, stood manfully behind home plate without the aid of a glove, much less a face mask or other protective gear, and hitters were allotted a gentleman’s five strikes and eight balls. It’s easier to dust off a Victorian ancestor with a walrus mustache than to deal directly with the ambiguities of the moment.

The anxiety about contemporary heroism is felt particularly among baseball’s literati. They have good reason to fret. Almost every year since the Hall began to take shape, in 1936, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America has voted to determine which players will be enshrined in the pantheon. It’s a task that the “scribes,” as they like to refer to themselves, regard as a sacred duty.

It’s a fitting role for writers. The legends of the game have always been formed in word as much as deed. In the old days, scribes magnified the exploits of players and offered a much more basic service: they brought the park to the people. In baseball’s early years, buying a ticket was the only way to watch a game, which meant that most people never saw their team in action and even fewer saw them play up close—a form of distant fandom unimaginable today. With the exception of fleeting images in occasional newsreels, the only way to experience the splendor of Babe Ruth’s swing, or of Lefty Grove striking out the side, was to read about it in the papers and magazines (and, after 1916, in the emerging form of the baseball novel). It was the job of radiomen to animate the action in the moment, and the job of the scribes to set the scene, spin the plots, develop the characters, and amplify the story over many seasons. It was only natural that writers would be gatekeepers of the Hall.

The scribes’ dominance over Hall elections has long been a matter of controversy, particularly among the always-contentious group of scribes themselves. Although they generally seem to relish their power over baseball’s stars—no doubt a nerdish revenge fantasy on celebrity jocks—scribes these days are feeling burned by the steroid era.

Filip Bondy, a New York Daily News reporter who reluctantly voted for Clemens, Bonds, and three other suspected steroid users, wrote about the stresses of this year’s vote.

I didn’t enjoy mailing in the ballot and I’m not particularly upset that none of these players attracted enough votes from fellow writers. I feel sorry for everyone trying to deal with this issue, including the voters, and grow angrier at the cheaters for dividing us into warring cliques.

The Hall electors have every reason to be angry with the players. But what about the writers themselves? Was there anyone closer to the action, to the players, than the game’s reporters? The use of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the nineties, was hardly a subtle matter. When a player’s facial features morph, when his head grows two hat sizes larger, when a wiry first baseman begins to resemble a bodybuilder, one tends to notice these changes. Some beat reporters saw Mark McGwire in the clubhouse every day, season after season. As reporters, wasn’t it their job to investigate, to ask questions, to develop good sources? Instead of remaining skeptical, many scribes were, like all of us, dazzled by the home runs and the drama of witnessing new records, and caught up in following the sagas of duelling sluggers. In spinning the grand story, writers were given a taste of glory, and enjoyed some of the best sports copy since the days of Ruth and Aaron.

In 1961, writers had the privilege of reporting on Roger Maris’s doing the near impossible and breaking the Babe’s single-season record of sixty home runs. At the turn of the twentieth century, they got to see Ruth’s record surpassed six times, including McGwire’s truly impossible seventy, in 1998, and Bonds’s seventy-three, in 2001. It’s almost touching now to read the breathless, sort-of embarrassing “Special Commemorative Issue” that Sports Illustrated published in 1998 to honor the “Great Home Run Race” between the juicers McGwire and Sammy Sosa. The steroid era was a moment of deception but also of starry-eyed self-deception; if it was a breakdown of integrity on the part of baseball’s stars it was also, in some measure, a failure of sports journalism.

Because the steroid story usually takes the form of a blame game, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reflection on the role that they, the baseball writers—or, for that matter, any dedicated observer of the game—may have played as enablers of cheating. I wonder about this myself. I remember watching Mark McGwire transform into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float version of himself and hit nine-thousand-foot home runs every other game and thinking that something was amiss. In that very same moment, I also somehow shelved my doubts so that I could enjoy the spectacle or, when I was feeling fancy, “witness history.” The sportswriting of that period, too, reveals a curious human talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing.

Consider the case of Sports Illustrated’s veteran baseball man, Tom Verducci. He was one of the savvier reporters who got it right and who did something about the problem. He is also, as he recently wrote, “slightly tougher than average” on the question of inducting steroid-implicated players into the Hall of Fame. He didn’t vote for Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens this year and doesn’t seem intent on giving them the nod any time soon (though he does predict that they will eventually gain enough support to reach the stringent threshold for induction into the Hall: seventy-five per cent of the vote).

Verducci has been at the center of the steroids question for over a decade now. In 2002, his long, front-page feature on baseball’s steroid epidemic was a turning point in the public’s awareness and the beginning of the league’s reluctant and long-overdue redress of the problem. In a column about the 2013 Hall of Fame steroid referendum, Verducci reflected on his 2002 investigation and his own dawning awareness that something strange was happening.

The genesis of that article was that during the 2001 season many clean players were complaining to me that steroids had become so prevalent in the game that they felt clearly disadvantaged. That’s when I knew the game reached a tipping point: when a few rogue early adopters had grown into hundreds of cheaters. The hundreds who played the game clean were harmed. Many lost jobs, money and opportunity by choosing to play the game clean. I think of them every time I get a Hall of Fame ballot.

Back in 2002, Verducci developed an excellent and talkative source, Ken Caminiti, who was willing to admit that he had used steroids during his 1996 M.V.P. season, and beyond, and that the problem was rampant in the majors. Verducci, in other words, did his job very well, with diligence and gusto.

But even no-nonsense Verducci had been taken in by the narrative back in the nineties. When you review his articles from that period, you see a writer who is struggling to make sense of a situation that doesn’t quite make sense. It’s fascinating to re-read Verducci’s reportage from 1998, the height of the home-run binge. The front cover of Sports Illustrated’s baseball preview that year featured his profile of Mark McGwire and a short item by him, titled “A Farewell to Skinny Arms,” introduced with the teaser: “The Boys of Summer are now beefy, pumped-up maulers ready to tear down the fences.… Welcome to Extreme Baseball, where too much is never enough.” The articles are accompanied by photos and drawings of men whose arms are the size of Hank Aaron’s entire body. Verducci was not at all blind to the situation; in fact, even in 1998, he saw it clearly, noted it, marvelled over it, and carefully avoided it. In that way, he was like most of us.

Verducci opened his preview of the 1998 baseball season with an apt and prescient description of the scene at spring training: “Every day this spring a battalion of protein drinks spiked with the muscle-enhancing supplement creatine awaited the New York Yankees after they ended their workouts in Tampa.… Like never before, baseball is about being buff.” That article and his profile of McGwire dwell on the size of the players’ bodies (“He is so big that his forearms are the same circumference as the neck of a very large man: 17½ inches”) and on how the men were poised to “maul” baseball’s oldest records. The tone alternates between a boyish enthusiasm for witnessing epoch-making baseball (“we are in the greatest home run era in history,” “the most amazing home run hitter since Babe Ruth”) and a subtle disdain, a sense of menace, betrayed in stray phrases dropped into every odd paragraph. In his descriptions of the conspicuous presence of creatine and other legal supplements, Verducci was identifying red flags. At one point, he quoted a player calling McGwire a “freak.” He even went as far as to write, in passing, about “whispers of steroids.” The dance between knowing and not knowing is on full display in even the best writing from the nineties.

All of the people with whom I spoke in Cooperstown during last week’s gloomy, steroid-addled non-Induction weekend told me that they weren’t worried at all. The Hall of Fame is about Baseball writ large, they told me, and depends not on the integrity of any individual or group of players.

“This was here before I was born,” a guy from Texas told me, pointing to Doubleday Field. “It’ll be here when you and me are gone and when nobody’ll know the name A-Rod.”

Thus spoke the prophet from Texas. Our great hope, he says, lies in the sacred ground of Cooperstown’s Doubleday Field, where Abner Doubleday invented baseball, in 1839—an event that didn’t actually happen. The account of baseball’s origin is about as historically reliable as the story of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith digging an ancient scripture writ on gold plates out of a hill a bit up the road from Cooperstown during that same period. Both baseball and Mormonism attempted to root themselves, and their holy narratives, on native New York ground. And both succeeded.

Maybe that’s the point; maybe the Texan is right. It might just take the moral authority of Cooperstown, founded on a whopper as big as any that came out of the mouth of Roger Clemens, to help the scribes write the game forward.